Looking back, with more time now on our hands than we had during a busy professional life, it is not uncommon to assess our past in terms of our successes. At times, especially on cloudy days, our attention can wander in the direction of questioning whether all we did really amounted to anything at all. The opposite of success is commonly thought of as failure, and in some minds, there is no middle ground, no question of kind or degree. Among the wealthy, there is always the question of whether there is someone else even more wealthy and if that is the case, it could be a failure not to be the richest of all.
But Winston Churchill famously said Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiam. He also said Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
More recently and more cryptically Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan left us with:
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
